Biting the hand of Project Fear

The unbearable snideness of Iain

Once upon a time, there was a discredited Tory leader. There’s been a fair few of those. This one had led his party to electoral humiliation at the hands of Tony Blair’s New Labour, and his lack of leadership skills, his insensitivity and tin ear, his gross incompetence, and his inability to distinguish truth from fiction had caused him to become the most risible leader of a major political party in decades. And that was no mean feat because this is the UK, where establishment incompetence and venality is so entrenched that Gordon Broon is still regarded – at least by the media – as a statesman instead of a man in a bit of a state.

That Tory leader was Iain Duncan Smith. It all started off so well, the Tory hopes that the quiet man of the right would set the party on the road to power after the serial disasters of William Hague’s term and leader were as bright as the glare on Iain’s shiny bald head which was going to rise like a full moon and cover up the star struck embarrassment of Wullie in a baseball cap yo-ing wit da yoof in a pathetically transparent attempt to make like the Tories still had some sort of relevance in the 21st century. The Tory party assured its media acolytes that there would be no more of this press office idiocy, and moon heid Iain’s straight talking and no-nonsense leadership would be a total eclipse of the spun.

The Tories had invested a lot of confidence in a man whose previous term in high office had been restricted to shouting at squaddies while having a sergeant major standing behind him. Following in the traditional pattern of rich and well connected families with idiot offspring, Iain got a commission in the British army. Unsuprisingly, within months it became clear that Iain was scarcely fit to manage a knitting pattern, as he purled himself in knots before the press on a daily basis. Sadly for Iain, but not anyone else, it all unravelled as quickly as the sock puppets on the BBC news, snagged on Nick Robinson’s toenails.

The core difficulty with Iain’s term in office wasn’t any great political dispute, it wasn’t any high priniciples. It wasn’t even the traditional Tory seppuku of party self harm over EU membership. It was that he was a duplicitious lying wee shyster and everyone was laughing at him. It soon transpired that Iain’s claims to have studied at the highly prestigious Italian university of Perugia boiled down in reality to having looked at a pamphlet advertising a course when he was there one weekend with his terribly well off missus, eating pasta and pizza on the piazza.

Iain had wrought such utter devastation on his own party and his own reputation that he wasn’t even able to take the traditional way out, accepting a directorship in a City financial institution. That’s how crap he was, and City financial institutions don’t exactly demand competence, skill, knowledge, or indeed moral probity from their political refugees. Instead, Iain had to flee on pilgrimage to Easterhoose in the hope of rescuing the remnants of his career from the wreckage of ruinage he’d brought down on his own baldy head. You have to be pretty piss poor as a Tory if you need to go and find some credibility in Easterhoose.

Iain came to Easterhoose. He basked in the poverty like a supplicant seeking salvation. Which is exactly what he was, unfortunately the only saving he was seeking was the salvation of his career. And as soon as he’d re-established a place for himself in the Tory party as the man who really “got” poverty, he pissed off in a posh car to a big house, a feat previously only achieved by some of the more entrepreneurial minded residents of the scheme. But Iain did it with pharisee press calls instead of pharmaceuticals.

Rebranding himself as a compassionate Conservative, Iain rebranded compassion too. Previously it meant to share in someone’s suffering, to feel their pain. Iain’s compassionate Conservatism means sharing out the pain so everyone suffers. Everyone except people like Iain, who have had the good fortune to have well connected and wealthy families. Iain’s never had to worry about feeding his well padded stomach. He’s never had to fret about ensuring that his kids have new shoes, that they’ll wake up in a house that’s heated. Iain’s got a cosy life, and that apparently makes him an expert in the psychology of poverty. Although admittedly a day trip to Shandwich Shopping Centre is more experience of poverty than any of the rest of the Tory Eton Boy cabinet have got.

Now Iain is telling us that work is good for your health, and wants us to believe that forcing the sick, the disabled and the terminally ill out to work in a crappy job on the minimum wage is actually a form of therapy for them. It’s all for their own good, and has absolutely nothing at all to do with an ideologically driven assault on the state. Heaven forfend you could think that. Iain’s a compassionate Christian Conservative.

Iain’s the kind of Christian that Jesus would condemn along with the money changers in the temple. I’m not a believer, but Iain is the kind of Christian that gives his faith a bad name, and he’s up against child abusing priests for competition. He thinks that social security is charity, and not an essential means of ensuring that all of us have a decent standard of living and a decent life. Because when there is poverty, when there’s a yawning gap between the richest and the poorest and that gap grows every wider, all of us are impoverished.

The usual suspects have joined in the condemnation of Iain’s incompetent compassion. Andy Burnham and the Daily Record fulminate against Tory policies that penalise those who are already poor, that punish the powerless and malkie the marginalised. But Andy condemnation couldn’t stretch to voting against the Conservatives, and the Daily Record campaigned for a No vote so Scotland was left prostrate before the Tory voting shires. Their compassion is as counterfeit as Iain’s.

There’s only one way to ensure that Scotland is safe from Iain’s brand of pitiless compassion and cruel care. That day is coming ever closer, when the unbearable snideness of Iain and the crocodile tears of those who only pretend to oppose are no more.

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IDS is the kind of politician who makes me wake up screaming in the night. He’s the man (and I use the term loosely) who put the ‘Con’ into Conservative. Haste the day when we can show him our contempt from within the compassionate embrace of an Independent, Socially Just Scotland!

Whenever I think of this individual, I see that well publicised image of him jumping up and down with glee at Osborne’s last outing and rage, utter contempt and heartache are the only emotions generated.

Mr Burnham and the Record don’t have far to look for culpability for what is happening. Labour and their media mouthpieces in Scotland are singularly responsible for our electorate suffering at the hands of Conservative government and indeed any future Conservative government. Hypocrites one and all.

This is after all their idea of better togetherness. THIS is the broad shouldered pooling and sharing their strategy guaranteed. For what is happening now and for the austerity yet to occur. For every child that goes without. For every soul pushed to desperation and the brink, they need look no further than a mirror.

“Iain’s claims to have studied at the highly prestigious Italian university of Perugia”
Today you don’t have to be an upper-class nitwit to go and look at the prospectus and maybe even study at Perugia University. Students can get an Erasmus scholarship but money still counts. They’ll still need some help from Mummy and Daddy unless they’ve saved hard from their Saturday jobs, Erasmus being what it is. Many young people don’t want to go after the Meredith Kirchner murder – and who could blame them ?https://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/who-killed-meredith-kercher/

“Once upon a time, there was a discredited Tory leader. There’s been a fair few of those.”

WGD, that must rank as the understatement of the millennium.

None of these liars, crooks and charlatans have done an honest day’s work in their mollycoddled lives, and that includes the Red Tories. None of them have ever had to do without food or heating, or had to choose between buying food or keeping warm.

We have always known that the Blue Tories have never given a damn about the “lower orders”, and whether they lived or died. However, we used to think that the Labour Party really did care about the ordinary man. The reality though is that the Labour Party since the days of Harold Wilson, who sent his children to private schools, and especially since the rise of the Red Tories under the leadership of the war criminal (and multi-millionaire) Bliar, have had as much care and consideration for the hoi polloi, the plebians, the helots and the peasants as the Blue Tories.

Scotland’s only chance to have a caring society which embraces the common weal, is to regain our independence.

Mr. Smith, as a Roman Catholic could never have been appointed Prime Minister, so his time as Tory Party leader was in the knowledge that he would be slaughtered by Tony Blair at the General Election, thus not wasting a real candidate’s chances for the future. On that occasion he took one for the Party. Now of course, he has no excuse or reason for the cruelty of his policies.

Eh’m!!!! The victor against IDS was a certain Tony Blair who I believe is also a Roman Catholic, So I don’t really think that point is relevant.
Although neither of them appear to have any Christian values about them.
Probably why I am a non believer in any of the so called religions.

They laughed at the cave drawings worshiping the Sun and the Moon!!!

At least those cavemen new that without the Sun and Moon there would be no food growing or water flowing on our planet.

Tony only converted to Roman Catholicism after he left high office, very shortly after he left, so the sectarian policies of the state remain inviolate. As you say though, this shift in ideology doesn’t seem to have influenced his principles.

I don’t think that IDS had the experience of “shouting at squaddies while having a sergeant major standing behind him”. He was commissioned in 1975 and left in 1981 6 years. It seems as if he was a Subaltern, the lowest form of animal life. He would never have commanded anything larger than a Platoon. It is only companies and larger who have a Sergeant Major as the Senior NCO. IDS would have had a Sargent to make sure that he didn’t do anything too stupid.

The conservative doctrine is underlined by individualism and small government. At its core it thinks government should not interfere or take responsibility for the ill, the elderly or the poor – working or otherwise. That’s societies job – the society they often declare does not exist. In reality it’s the politics for people who think their shit don’t stink. It’s as John Stewart would say: A baffling, willfully blind cognitive dissonance where if they have success, they built it. If they failed, the public sector ruined it for them. If they get a break, they deserved it. If you get a break, it’s a handout and an entitlement. It’s the politics for people want power for nothing more than selling it off to private vested interests who are not accountable to the voter. They turn their backs on the victims of their failures. They persist in “not getting it”. They sell things they don’t own. They make the word “profit” sound like “vomit” and are genuinely surprised that you won’t chug down on a cup of it. They mock you for needing services that you paid into all your life.

It maybe that conservatism was not like this once. Harold Macmillan once said “We tried to make it sort of jolly for everyone”. What it is now is a party of mean spirited bullies who are so disconnected from everyday life they might as well be living on another planet.

The are the one party I have never considered voting for. I feel that everytime I voted ABT I was bearing witness and speaking for their victims.

I started on September 19th when I heard the chinless wonder reveal EVEL whilst waxing lyrical on BTs Pyrrhic victory. That and ‘I feckin’ telt ye’. Both are now used on a weekly basis and aimed at friends and workmates who voted no. Now with an added extra of ‘so what are you going to do about it?’ thrown in for good measure.

I’m not a great believer in religious organisations but I do believe there’s a higher being (otherwise ive been talking to myself quite a lot) and another place to go when we die unfortunately under Tory rule it’s going to be a lot sooner for a lot more of us.

What really gets ma goat is how on earth a ‘Christian’ can stand and preach the word of Jesus in a church with IDS in it and not want to boot him where it hurts. I’m not saying he should actually do that but he could think it, mind you causing actual harm to someone would be hypocritical for a priest, then again It seems a bit hypocritical to preach about helping the poor, the disabled and sick, the down trodden or the needy when there’s a man in your congregation who along with a group of other so called tory/ labour Christians are making these things happen with their inhumane ideology.
A big part of IDS’s religion is supposed to be about reconciliation and forgiveness but you have to ask for or want forgiveness, even show signs you want to change to receive reconciliation. I’ve no seen Beelzebub Smith doing any of that lately.

Maybe my perceptions wrong, It’s only my opinion and it’s an angry opinion at that but all these religious figureheads should be doing more, it’s gone beyond politics it’s personal now, instead of turning a blind eye and waiting till there’s loads more depravity and death then apologising for not doing the right thing at the right time. Sounds familiar eh! Maybe open up the churches that IDS and his ilk go to on a Sunday to feed the homeless and hungry, instead of praying for them in a sanctimonious hypocritical way.
I would have more respect for these preachers if they showed a bit more humanity maybe a bit more civic action instead of kowtowing to the elite.

These people use religion, ie
christianity etc, to pretend that they are doing good, when in fact they are doing devoid of any morality, any care and compassion and especially seriously lacking any sense of a conscience.

To be in positions of power in making decisions about peoples lives and livelyhoods, is very scary. It is a fact that they act like judge and jury and feed on their prey the poor. They are parasites.

Organised religion has always taken the moral high ground and these people such as ids hide behind that. No thanks.

Great post again Paul.
Spot on once again. The following passage gets right to the root of the problem with Scottish Labour and the media.

“Andy Burnham and the Daily Record fulminate against Tory policies that penalise those who are already poor, that punish the powerless and malkie the marginalised. But Andy condemnation couldn’t stretch to voting against the Conservatives, and the Daily Record campaigned for a No vote so Scotland was left prostrate before the Tory voting shires. Their compassion is as counterfeit as Iain’s”.